edit: user albums are open again, see here for details.
second edit: The gallery is open again, feel free to resume uploading.

Hi all,

Over the past few weeks the staff have been musing about the site, the content we currently host and how to make use of our available resources. We've come up with a plan to simplify the content we offer - the intent is to put more effort into the well-loved parts of the site and remove the neglected ones.

Forums
Roughly 2/3 of everything stored on our site is in the doujin forums, these forums are also some of the most popular. However the next-biggest forums (the creative forums), have over twice as many views as the doujin forums, despite using less than half the disk space. For those curious, 3D tends to be more popular than 2D across all areas of the site, and uses correspondingly more disk.

We'd like to reflect this difference by giving priority to the creative forums and the works created by our own members. The idea we have is to regularly prune the doujin forums - locking and subsequently deleting any threads inactive for some period of time (TBC). We'll still welcome fresh content in these forums, but the focus would shift from a permanent archive to a running feed of the latest-and-greatest content on the internet.

The creative forums will continue to function as they are now, hosting all uploaded works indefinitely.

We may also look at pruning many of the subforums, reducing the number of forums available to a simpler, flatter layout.

Quieter parts
There are many other sections of the site where content is hosted:

User albums

Social groups

The booru/gallery

The "downloads" section

These sections are largely neglected by staff, and the volume of activity in these parts is far lower than any of the main forums. They've also done an effective job of fragmenting our content across several independent sections, making it that much harder to find what you're looking for. We're looking to delete all four of these sections so as to bring all the content together into the forums - one place for everything.

The plan
We don't want to metaphorically "pull the rug out" by deleting a bunch of content with no warning, so we're beginning a grace period to allow any enthusiasts to archive older content. You'll find the four to-be-deleted sections are now read-only, and all the older threads in the doujin forums have been locked. Please take this opportunity to download copies of anything you want to keep. Sometime in the near future (perhaps a month's time) we will begin deleting the old and obsolete content from the site. Please read the updated discussion on user albums here.

FAQs
I saw a few recurring themes in the previous thread about disk space, I'd like to address them here so we don't have to repeat them again.

What about the role playing/creative writing/text?
The size of text is tiny compared to images - the collective text of every post on our entire forums is less than 1GB (compared to ~560GB of images). Given we already have a forum platform in place for hosting images, there's no reason we shouldn't reuse the same platform for hosting writing as well.

Can't we just buy more disk
This is not just about fitting all our content in. We're fairly limited in terms of staff as well, both moderators and IT/admin work are in short supply. We'd like to upgrade to a newer forum platform sometime in the mid-term future, but we just don't have the resources to migrate all the different parts of our site. Reducing the number of moving parts is an important first step to making a platform change feasible.

Feedback
Feedback is always welcome, so feel free to use this thread to let us know what you think of the changes.

Also known as "we're running out of disk space". We've managed to hit a whopping 600GB of attachments on the forums, which is running pretty close to the total amount of space available to us. Me & the rest of the staff will have to come up with a plan to free some space, most likely this will involve pruning old attachments.

In the past we've used a weighted system where attachments are more likely to be pruned if they're older, larger, or less-downloaded. I'm not sure if we'll continue with the weighted system or use a simple "delete the oldest stuff" method yet, but feedback is welcome.

Uploading of new attachments is temporarily suspended while we figure this out. Stay tuned for more updates!